Tradefarm – Trade games for Animals, and Animals for games

Several years ago, I had the idea for a web-based game trading platform. Like most of my ideas, it was caged somewhere in the back of my brain and never managed to get out.

The good news is, also like most of my ideas, someone else had the same inspiration but actually followed through. There is now Tradefarm, a community of game traders based on a meta-currency called Animals. As your Animals account fills up, you can look for games you’d like and purchase them with the meta-currency, so what you are really trading is games for games.

Tradefarm has a rather slick interface that allows you to put your games up for trade by just searching for the title in the database, then adding them with one click. You don’t have to dig for pictures, age ratings, nothing. All of that is supplied by Amazon through Amazon’s API (there is also an Amazon buy link with every game), and I’m not yet sure whether that is good or bad. The point so far is that it works, and very quickly. It’s much easier to put your games into Tradefarm and let them wait for a buyer there than it is to enter them into an auction site.

It’s currently a free service and limited to Switzerland, but if this pans out, let’s hope they go international.

Update: I’ve just traded three of my old titles for a rather highly acclaimed new one (Wario Ware: Smooth Moves for Wii). Better ratio than e.g. Gamestop, where I would have had to bring three old games and pay CHF 29.90 (around EUR 20) in cash. Whee 🙂

That’s fantastic news, thanks for letting us know! I’ve noticed there are at least three other trading sites that have sprung up, especially in Germany (Hitflip, for example). I don’t know who was the first to have this idea, but Tradefarm’s clean interface and streamlined way to add items, now even including barcode support, makes Tradefarm seem more huggable than the competition 🙂